[In the following review, Shulman compares The Artist's Widow to the work of Charles Dickens and praises Mackay as a highly talented novelist.]

It is traditional for novelists to write about painters, and with good reason. Paint makes manifest the invisible concerns of the writer; and the task of describing the painter at his work does not overload the burden of authorial research. So when Shena Mackay opens her new novel [The Artist's Widow]—about a painter—with an opening, it seems almost a nod of recognition to this arrangement of long standing.

The opening in question is a private view of works by John Crane, a painter whose credentials—British, Academic, representational, painterly, given to forming artistic communities in English seaside towns—ensure him a place at the furthest conceivable remove from the centre of fashion. It is an opening that, we are told on the dust jacket, “will change [the characters'] lives for ever”, an odd assertion in view of the fact that there is nobody there whose life is changed by it at all. Certainly not the painter Lyris Crane; her life was changed for ever when the death of her husband, John, turned her into the Artist's Widow of the title. For her, this party is the occasion when all the humiliations of her new position are borne irresistibly home to her.

Mackay is capable of compressing whole predicaments and their histories into a phrase. At this party, she works the room with such skill that, in just a few pages, we, like Lyris, can see it all. Here is Lyris asking Louis, the gallery owner (who has inherited the dealership of John Crane, along with the gallery, from his mother), if he could “go and be nice” to a couple who know no one and whose portraits are on the wall:

“John was very fond of them. Before you ask them what they do, Tony has a washing machine repair business and Anne's a dinner lady at our local school.”

Louis made a derisively submissive little bow and left her.

In this gesture, Mackay has managed to communicate not only the precise and relative standing, in the scale of Louis's opinion, of Anne and Tony, of John Crane and of Lyris, but the full force of that compound insult as it strikes Lyris. One hopes there are readers for novels in which people's lives are not changed for every, only realized in sentences sprung like that.

Also at the party is young Nathan Pursey, the great-nephew of John Crane. Nathan is a conceptual artist of the kind that feeds the vacuum of their talent with atrocities and narcissism. He works in rotten meat and sweetie wrappers and cyberspace, but his preferred medium is publicity, or would be if he could attract any. Plainly he is everything Lyris is not; and just as his brief peckings at the surfaces of ideas echo his faithlessness as a friend and lover, so Lyris's endless fascination with paint evokes her lifelong love of a single man. But Mackay is too economical to leave Nathan as a simple foil. He is also son and heir to the great comic characters of this book, the Purley Purseys.

I am well aware that any dodgy family appearing to comic effect in a London novel will, like a leech, draw out the words “Charles Dickens”. However, the righteous venality of the Purley Purseys and the author's most evident relish in creating them make the comparison unavoidable. Mackay is nowhere wittier than in her treatment of Nathan's family and their business (they are purveyors, mainly to gangland, of artistic floral tributes) which reflects so hilariously on Nathan's own line of work. A glorious scene with the Purseys at dinner in an Italian restaurant shows Mackay as a superb comic writer (“‘I wonder if I can make room for a knickerbocker glory, Pat?’, Sonia said, bringing her into the conversation”), but able also to reveal, through the comedy, exactly how the family favour has been distributed, and with what crushing results.

As a novelist, Shena Mackay is highly talented: she can do dialogue, description, characterization, drama, humour, pathos; moreover, she achieves her effects without adverting to them, as though she expects the reader to take a point lightly made. Indeed, what makes The Artist's Widow an unmistakable work of maturity is that it employs the author's every accomplishment while displaying none. For example, she puts her gift for idiom at the service of the book's central theme of loneliness.

Everyone here is lonely: Candy, an MP's abandoned mistress; Clovis the bookseller, damned by an act of gross cowardice; Jacki, Nathan's conciliatory girlfriend who wants to be liked and is not. But the loneliness of Lyris is the most acute; so much so that she is, crucially, vulnerable to the limited charms of Nathan. Mackay never alludes to it, but—making us first aware that here is a woman habituated, over fifty years of marriage, to being perfectly understood—she then beautifully demonstrates it in conversations where nobody can read Lyris's idiom and, with the typical condescension of the young, think she is perhaps misusing theirs. Only an expert mimic could bring this off.

There is one important lapse of judgment here. The events of this novel occur over the latter part of last summer. At length a horrible suspicion arises that we are all hastening towards a tunnel on the banks of the Seine; and so it proves. Doubtless Mackay could not foresee how the repeated batterings of the past ten months would make us dead to this subject, which now numbs everything that touches it. All the same, it's sad when a good book comes to a bad end.